Why am I so Bad at Publishing Articles Consistently?

Now I really have a good reason for it this time: in 3 weeks, I moved, produced 2 new (and 2 revised) books for, and attended, a (mini) Comic Con. So I’m late, I get it, and I really shouldn’t be, but it seems that of the things I’m late for, doing my articles on Friday are the one I’m most consistently late at (not counting videos, and editorial cartoons).

I have wondered why this was the case in the past. And I really don’t know. I’m (for the most part) on time with most of my reviews and especially my comics. It’s just something about the “medium” form writing that makes me late.

It might be a lack of inspiration, or ideas, rather. What in the world do people read on the internet these days? And it has that Blogging problem of most people’s lives not actually being interesting enough to maintain a Blog. It’s also the fact that I started them as a comedy thing, and longer-form comedy is not how my brain works.

That’s why I’ve mainly switched away from comedy. Doing articles on things I’m interested in, or things that are happening right now, is just easier.

They are also posted on a traditionally weekend day, Saturday, (or now Friday). And while almost all of the rest of my life has completely forgotten about any artificial day/week structure, maybe it’s still there in that sense for this article writing. And while for anything else I can wait until the night it’s scheduled for to do it. For Blogging, that really doesn’t work. So waiting until the last minute on a Thursday night/Friday morning might be a terrible scheduling idea.

It’s all still excuses. I really just need to do it, which I have been making a new routine to do more easily. I know that it is something I can do since I usually can catch up. It just needs to be done in a more organized fashion. So I’ve been reading about time management, and I’ll get back to this topic in a few months and see if it’s worth another post about my progress.

Table Topics Family 25 #49-50

QUESTIONS

1. When was it most difficult to persevere when you wanted to quit?

2. If you were offered one million dollars could you get straight A’s next year?

ANSWERS By: Austin Smith

1. I might say right now, I’ve never really wanted to quit anything I was doing, and  now isn’t an exception, but the lack of things moving forward in what I’m doing makes it tempting to consider “regular” work.

2. I am no longer in school, but when I was I got straight A’s on the promise of a dollar for ever “100” and 5 for every A on my report card, so I’d say I could do it. (I could’ve done better, but that was the only way my parents could keep me from being so bored I just didn’t do any work)

Moving Mountains

It feels like I’ve been moving mountains. I know I haven’t been, but it feels like it, at least it does now. In a few years I’ll look back and say ‘man that was easy, why can’t now be like then’. Of course, that’s what I think now about school. That was way too easy.

Anyway, you might wonder what I’ve been doing. Well, aside from my current schedule of providing from two to four pieces of content a day, I’ve been: Registering two LLCs with the state, getting DBAs for those two companies, working on advertising, and finishing up and publishing two websites, et cetera. (I also had to deal with some banks that wouldn’t let me get an account, so that failed.)

This may sound easy to some people, especially parts of it. But to me right now that was almost overwhelming. Okay, that might not be the right word, but I’ll go with it.

I’m not exactly sure what to say about the experience. It wasn’t actually difficult, it just felt that way, and it was very time-consuming. I guess time-consuming things are more difficult just based on premise. There were several hiccups, though not as many as I expected, being a few years ‘too young’ to be doing this kind of thing.

Everything has gone along smoothly as far as resistance is concerned though, most of the hiccups were easily gone around, though that was the longer path. The main problem has been that my work has suffered from doing these things. Paper work takes time, especially by mail, so between filling out forms, mailing them, and waiting for them I’ve used up a large chunk of time that I was previously using to create more content. Though most of the content is still eventually being created, it is sometimes late, and is really crunching my schedule. Most of these things are done, but things like the site meta-data are still works in progress.

This is really more of a blog update than an article or something. I just thought it was sort of interesting considering it has been consuming my life for a little while now. I hope anyone who cares was interested and I hope I didn’t kill anyone else with boredom. This has been a long process, but it is still much more gratifying than anything I did in school. And I hope all reading this will get to enjoy the future things I create because of this process.

If You Can’t Write… Don’t.

Articles are hard, just sayin’ that. Depending on the definition of article being used they can be even harder. What exactly makes an article is really up to either the author or the publisher. The same thing applies to when a short story becomes a novella, a novella a novel, and so on. But other than that they’re just plain hard. Writing is hard, every writer is the first to admit that (every high school “artist” wouldn’t in a “million” years). And contrary to popular belief, writing is becoming harder. While anyone can now become a writer, attention spans are becoming shorter. People who “write” write very little. Bloggers even have to force themselves to come up with interesting content. At least the interesting ones do. How many times have you come across a dead Blog with a promising start, that just disappeared. Or, more realistically, just sucked and piddled out. Everyone has a Blog, everyone posts words, or videos or something on the internet. However most just wither and die. Most “writers” don’t have the attention span or the drive to continue writing. Even people who are attentive to their Blogs fail because they can’t push themselves to continue creating content. Eventually preconceived ideas drain and nothing new comes. It seems cliche now to say that every writer finds it hard to write and most have to force themselves to start, but it is true. The difference is that most people say that to encourage people to write. I am not trying to encourage you: writing is hard, really hard and time consuming. But I don’t mean to discourage you either, if you write well then write, if you can force yourself to. Just because writing on a computer is easy, doesn’t mean you have great ideas, just because you have great ideas, doesn’t mean you can force yourself to write them, or that when you do it will be good.

Most writers that continually create content write as either their job or as a major hobby, and it works like any other hobby. Just like how the movie buff spends most of his free time watching movies, or that model collector you know spends his putting together little plastic pieces and painting them, writers spend theirs writing. It takes time and dedication to do, and if that is not applied, it is crap. And as much as the writer in me wants to say it’s hard because you’re continually being attacked by dinosaurs, going to parties, flying pigs around Mount Everest, and communing with the soul of William S. Burroughs, that is simply not the case. Any writer able to continue creating deserves commendation, but those unable to should not be concerned. The ubiquity of the Blog is unnecessary. Not everyone needs to be a writer. There are other ways a voice can be heard, or maybe it won’t even be your voice but your actions. Writers may be able to write more and arguably better then you, but you can do better than them at something. And if you are a writer continue to be so, the amount of dead Blogs grows every day from forgotten passwords to lack of content, don’t let yours fall into the same hole. But my intent is mainly a caution: do what you do, and not what the internet does.